AP 11/06 19:36 EST V0397
NEW YORK (AP) -- Jeffrey Schmalz, a reporter for The New York Times
who wrote with passion and insight about AIDS and the people suffering
from it, died of complications from the disease Saturday. He was 39.
He died in his Manhattan home, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Schmalz, who spent his entire two-decade career as a journalist at
the newspaper, discovered in December 1990 that he had AIDS. After a
year away from work battling AIDS-related illnesses, he returned to the
Times and covered AIDS and homosexual issues.
"To have AIDS is to be alone, no matter the number of friends and
family members around," Schmalz wrote in a deeply personal article in
December. "Then, to be with someone who has HIV, be it interviewer or
interviewee, is to find kinship."
Born in Abington, Pa., he began his career as a night copy boy in
January 1973 while a student at Columbia University, where he studied
economics.
He was a regional editor and a metropolitan news reporter before
being named chief of the paper's Albany bureau in 1986. He joined the
national staff in 1988, working as a bureau chief in Miami and becoming
deputy national editor in New York two years later.
It was while he was deputy national editor that he suffered a brain
seizure at his desk that led to the discovery he had acquired immune
deficiency syndrome.
"The healthy Jeff was an outstanding correspondent and editor with a
great future in American journalism," said Max Frankel, the Times'
executive editor. "Jeff in illness plumbed the depth of his experience
and applied it brilliantly to his coverage of the plague, producing a
remarkable bequest to American journalism."
Schmalz likened his situation as a reporter to women covering
women's issues, or blacks covering issues of importance to blacks,
calling it "the cutting edge of journalism."
"Some people think that it is the journalism that suffers, that
objectivity is abandoned," he wrote. "But they are wrong. If the
reporters have any integrity at all, it is they who suffer, caught
between two allegiances."
Schmalz is survived by a sister, Wendy Wilde of New York City.